Difference between revisions of "Warren G. Harding"

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Warren G. (Gamaliel) Harding (November 2, 1865 - August 2, 1923) was an Ohio Senator and the 29th President of the United States of America. After the First World War, his presidency was marked as a "return to normalcy". Mr. Harding and his running mate Calvin Coolidge were elected by a large majority over James Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in large part because of the American people's rejection of the internationalist policies of former President Woodrow Wilson, particularly the League of Nations. ^[1]

Harding's undeviating Republicanism and vibrant speaking voice, plus his willingness to let the machine bosses set policies, led him far in Ohio politics. He served in the state Senate and as Lieutenant Governor, and unsuccessfully ran for Governor. He delivered the nominating address for President Taft at the 1912 Republican Convention. In 1914 he was elected to the Senate. An Ohio admirer, Harry Daugherty, began to promote Harding for the 1920 Republican nomination because, he later explained, "He looked like a President." [1]

Key Accomplishments

• Eliminated wartime controls
• Slashed taxes
• Established a Federal budget system,
• Restored the high protective tariff
• Imposed tight limitations upon immigration

Immigration Control

Mr. Harding signed into law the Emergency Quota Act^[2] which sought to control immigration following World War I and preserve the distinctive American culture by ensuring the majority of immigrants came from the historically compatible cultures of Northern Europe. This law aimed to bring wages of hard working Americans under control by limiting immigration to 3% of the 1910 census. It was followed on by a similar act in 1924, after Mr. Harding's death.^[3]

Tulsa Race Riot

Harding sought to calm race relations during the Tulsa Race Riot and events that followed. His wise words helped to calm the nation especially in the Tulsa area at this time of disturbance. His press secretary also sent a telegram to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People offering the president's support. ^[4]

Justice

Harding pardoned the socialist Eugene Debs who was imprisoned during World War I for opposing the war. Despite their political differences, Harding was cordial to him and met with him in the White House, "I have heard so damned much about you, Mr Debs, that I am very glad to meet you personally."^[5]

Harding defined the Supreme Court for two decades, appointing four solidly conservative justices. Harding's appointments included former President William Howard Taft to be Chief Justice (1921), George Sutherland (1922), Pierce Butler (1923) and Edward Terry Sanford (1923). Two of these justices (Taft and Sanford) served until 1930. The other two (Sutherland and Butler) served until the late 1930s and stood up to the liberal policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In particular, Sutherland and Butler were the core of the conservative Four Horsemen who invalidated key aspects of the New Deal and drove President Roosevelt to propose his court-packing scheme, which caused him to lose his credibility with Congress and the public.

In selecting Pierce for the bench, Harding broke with tradition by picking a conservative Democrat even though Harding was a Republican.

Fiscal

The Bureau of the Budget was created during Harding's tenure. Harding attempted to restrain the federal budget and reduce expenses on wartime armaments. This stimulated the private economy and lead to a period of prosperity experienced in the United States during the 1920s known as the Roaring 20s. Shortly after taking office, Harding also successfully passed promotion of US Agriculture, repeal of the wartime "excess profits" tax and reduction of rail rates.^[6] Due in part to Mr. Harding's conservative economic policies, the US experienced a period of profound economic growth in the early 1920s that continued through most of the decade.

Military

Harding presided over modernization of the U.S. forces including the addition of the experimental aircraft carrier Langley and the T-2 submarine, as well as the creation of a merchant marine which was critical in early US involvement in WWII via the Lend-Lease Act.^[7]

Diplomatic

Harding avoided entangling alliances that lead to war and defended US interests. Mr. Harding outlined his policy in his inaugural address: "...every commitment must be made in the exercise of our national sovereignty. Since freedom impelled, and independence inspired, and nationality exalted, a world supergovernment is contrary to everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our Republic. This is not selfishness, it is sanctity. It is not aloofness, it is security. It is not suspicion of others, it is patriotic adherence to the things which made us what we are." ^[8]

Supported by his conservative colleagues in congress as well as the American people, Harding succeeded at continuing to keep the United States out of the League of Nations. ^[9]

Harding's administration was successful in negotiating the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited battleships.

Labor issues

Mr. Harding's administration helped bring about the 40-hour work week which restricted the economic output of the US and restricted small, medium and large businesses alike.

Teapot Dome incident

Mr. Harding, in a quest to help re-privatize land taken from the American people and industry by their own government, appointed Senator Albert B. Fall of New Mexico as his Secretary of the Interior. Falls misappropriated this effort for his own gain in an abuse of the public trust. Democrats in congress, lead by Senator Thomas J. Walsh and Republican Senator Robert M. LaFollette (a former progressive), began an investigation with the support of the conservationist interests that backed them. They found that Fall had used his privatization efforts to benefit himself to the tune of over $400,000. Mr. Fall also had entangled other businessmen and politicians into his wrongdoing which lead to other indictments of both Democrats and Republicans and continued into the Coolidge administration. Mr. Harding did not know about these dealings until shortly before his death. In later years the petroleum reserves would prove to be less valuable than initially overestimated by the government. ^[10]

"The President's Daughter"

In 1928, Nan Britton published a book entitled "The President's Daughter" claiming that she and Harding had been lovers and had conceived a child in 1919. According to her, the affair continued for six years, and the lovers' meeting-places included a coat closet in the executive offices of the White House.^[11]

Death

The death of President Warren Harding would eventually give rise to a savage case of liberal character assassination. Through allegations made by a political novelist, an alleged adulterous lover of Warren Harding’s, and a criminal who would die in Leavenworth prison for accepting money in exchange for returning the kidnapped Lindbergh baby, liberal historian Frederick Lewis Allen would plant firmly in the public mind the notions that Harding was murdered by his wife, out of jealousy and fear of political scandal.^[12]

Shaken by the talk of corruption among the friends he had appointed to office, Warren and Florence Harding began a tour on June 20, 1923 of the West and Alaska. He hoped to get out and meet people, to shake hands and explain his policies. Although suffering from high blood pressure and an enlarged heart, he seemed to enjoy himself and the food -- especially the seafood in Alaska. On his return journey, he became ill with what was then attributed to food poisoning. The Presidential train rushed to San Francisco, where his condition worsened. He developed pneumonia, and complicated by his heart ailment, died suddenly on August 23, he suffered a heart attack in the evening, while his wife was reading to him. He died quietly and instantaneously.

After Harding’s death, the reputation of his administration was tarnished by revelations of scandal, primarily the Teapot Dome scandal (mentioned above) and a scandal in the Veteran’s Administration which was particularly distasteful in that post World War I period. The scandals were pushed forward by congressional hearings, but were greeted by the public with what liberal historian Frederick Lewis Allen concedes was brief resentment at both scandals and scandalmongers, followed by apathy.^[13]

In 1926, author Samuel Hopkins Adams published the novel “Revelry”, with characters which appeared to be thinly disguised members of the Harding administration. The president in the novel, “Willis Markham” poisons himself by accident, but does not take an available antidote, because he realizes that his death “will wipe out the whole score” of soon to be revealed scandals involving oil and the Veteran’s Administration. The novel was later dramatized .^[14]. Adams was a successful writer, and would go on to write the story which would become Frank Capra’s film “It Happened One Night”, and to share screenwriting credits with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on an unrelated film, “The President’s Mystery” in 1936. His fictional account of Harding’s death brought the issue of poison firmly into the public mind.

The publication of Nan Britton’s book "The President's Daughter" in 1928 portrayed the late President as a womanizer, which historians now unanimously agree was true, even if some disputes remain regarding the degree to which Harding was involved with Ms. Britton herself, and as to the paternity of her child.

In 1930, Gaston B. Means, a lifelong criminal who had nonetheless managed to get himself hired as an FBI agent for a brief time during the Harding administration, published “The Strange Death of President Harding, by Gaston B. Means as told to May Dixon Thacker", in which he alleged that Mrs. Harding murdered her husband out of jealousy of Ms. Britton, and out of fear of the soon to be revealed Teapot Dome and Veteran’s Administration scandals. Means was later described by J. Edgar Hoover, who knew Means personally, as “the greatest faker of all time” and “the most amazing figure in contemporary criminal history”. Means, who had been previously acquitted of murder and had been involved in a number of other questionable situations such as possible insurance fraud, was convicted of bootlegging and mail fraud in 1925. While in prison he met May Dixon Thacker, who was interested in the rehabilitation of prisoners, and convinced her that he had been unjustly convicted. He convinced her to help him write a tell-all book about how he was railroaded, but as May Dixon Thacker herself wrote in a subsequent magazine article, he failed to provide her with any of the documentation of his account that he had promised. In the end, she made most of it up.^[15] Means would go on to further criminal enterprise, and would finally be convicted of swindling Florence Harding’s close friend Evalyn Walsh McLean of over $100,000.00 which he was to use to ransom the kidnapped Lindbergh baby. Means was then sent to Leavenworth, where he died.

No forensic evidence has ever been found to suggest that Warren G. Harding had been poisoned by any person, let alone his wife. The suggestion that she had a motivation to kill the president because of Florence Harding’s jealousy over an affair with Nan Britton makes little sense in light of the nearly unanimous consensus of modern historians that Harding had been a womanizer for many years prior to his election to the Presidency, and his wife had had knowledge of at least some of those affairs. The suggestion that she would murder the President to somehow deflect scandals that would be met by public apathy is similarly unlikely. Yet despite the source of these charges, their utter lack of factual support, and the unlikeliness of the alleged motives of the First Lady, Frederick Lewis Allen would repeat these charges in his very successful book “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s” in 1931. Coming as it did in the deepest part of the Great Depression, Allen’s book, which depicted all of the Republican presidents of the 1920s as bumbling incompetents, was eagerly accepted by a public looking for someone to blame. Allen’s history remains in print, and continues to provide misinformation quoted in poorly researched histories, articles and encyclopedias down to the present day.

The impact of Allen’s attack on Harding’s character is astounding in its depth. For decades afterward, Harding was routinely rated as the worst president in United States history in polls of professional historians, and the portrayal of Harding as a clueless fool who died one way or another because of political scandals has been accepted, even by many conservatives, as gospel. The success of Allen in damaging the collective memory of Republican presidents, Harding among them, continues to effect the public’s perception of both parties and their relative competence.

Criticism

Harding today has come under criticism by both liberal economists and free trade advocates for protectionist policies--restrictions on free trade--which resulted in the collapse of international trade and is widely considered a cause of the worldwide Great Depression that occurred later in the decade and throughout the 1930s. Most economic historians today, however, follow liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s view that the Great Depression was primarily the result of a bank collapse due to a lack of effective regulation of the loan and credit market^[16] Those economists who believe that high tariffs were an important cause of the Depression often note that the tariff made it harder for European nations to pay their war debts.

Trivia

• Out of all of the Presidents of the U.S. he had the largest feet.
• He was the first president to visit Alaska.
• He was the first President to speak on the radio and the first to have a radio in the White House.
• Harding and John F. Kennedy are the only two sitting United States Senators elected to the Presidency in the 20th century.

References

1. ↑ http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=atb037b09&templatename=/article/article.html
2. ↑ http://tucnak.fsv.cuni.cz/~calda/Documents/1920s/QuotaAct1918.html
3. ↑ http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so11/Race/quota_acts.htm
4. ↑ http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3812/is_199911/ai_n8854233
5. ↑ http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/vodebs.htm
6. ↑ http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=0193620-00
7. ↑ http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=0193620-00
8. ↑ http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=25833
9. ↑ http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=atb037b09&templatename=/article/article.html
10. ↑ http://ap.grolier.com/article?assetid=0380900-00
11. ↑ Allen, Frederick Lewis (1931), Only Yesterday, ch. VI, "Harding and the Scandals"
12. ↑ Ferrell, Robert H. (1996), The Strange Deaths of President Harding, University of Missouri Press p.31
13. ↑ http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/ALLEN/ch6.html
14. ↑ Ferrell, Robert H. (1996), The Strange Deaths of President Harding, University of Missouri Press p.33
15. ↑ Ferrell, Robert H. (1996), The Strange Deaths of President Harding, University of Missouri Press pp. 42-43
16. ↑ Galbraith, John Kenneth (1954) The Great Crash 1929, Houghton Mifflin